ENGAGEMENT: Presence to Influence: Examining the Politics of Representation in Global Environmental Governance

“I felt rushed so I was like ahh, I couldn’t catch what everyone was saying,” Kate reflected. Kate was one of five students assisting on an interdisciplinary project, entitled Presence to Influence, that focuses on examining how Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized groups influence global environmental governance. This late evening in September the seven person team led by Dr. Kimberly Marion Suiseeya (Northwestern University) and Dr. Laura Zanotti (Purdue University) was in Honolulu huddled around a small digital recording device, with our laptops clicking and notebooks strewn about. It was the third day of the 2016 World Conservation Congress (WCC). The Presence to Influence team’s hotel rooms had become makeshift meeting areas, where we assembled chairs around small tables and beds for our daily debriefs. At once exhausted and exhilarated from over 35 hours of data recorded, more than 1,000 photographs snapped, and pages and pages of field notes collected at the Congress, team meetings would often begin with sighs of exhaustion, excited conversations from moments that resonated that day, and the never popular discussion of data management.